Sunday, June 30, 2002

Denver, CO - June 26, 2002 - The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) today announced the immediate availability of BPML 1.0, the first public draft for the 1.0 release of the Business Process Modeling Language. BPML 1.0 Supports the Modeling of End-to-End Processes Including Private Implementations and Public Interfaces for Transactional and Collaborative Business Process.

The Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) specification provides an abstract model for modeling executable end-to-end business processes. BPML defines a formal model for expressing abstract and executable processes that address all aspects of enterprise business processes, including activities of varying complexity, transactions and their compensation, data management, concurrency, exception handling, and operational semantics. BPML also provides a grammar in the form of an XML Schema for enabling the persistence and interchange of process definitions across heterogeneous systems and modeling tools.

"The publication of BPML 1.0 is a significant achievement for those involved in the process movement," said Howard Smith, BPMI.org co-chair and Computer Sciences Corporation CTO, EMEA. "For vendors, BPML offers a stable semantic foundation that is supporting the development and extension of process technologies. For systems integrators, BPML defines a reference architecture governing round-trip process lifecycle within enterprise IT architectures. The upshot for end user organizations is that a BPMS provides a coherent, robust and efficient approach to top down process design, deployment, and evolution-centered on business strategy and customer requirements."

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

Most computer systems are designed to process transactions, discrete events that take place in a moment and then are complete. But many business processes take place over a period of time, often involving a sequence of discrete activities, typically with variable outcomes. In the past, business processes have been automated and managed using proprietary technologies that involved a high degree of customization. Whether in a document workflow or process automation environment or using application integration technologies, traditional approaches were well suited for automating high-volume production processes that justified the substantial consulting costs associated with such projects.

In the new model of the agile enterprise, software should be componentized for easy reuse and adaptation in service-oriented architectures. Orchestration is business logic that sequences, coordinates, and manages conversations among Web services. To program a complex activity—a process workflow or an online transaction, for example—orchestration technologies make it possible to logically chain discrete functions into interenterprise business processes, allowing them to take advantage of the quickly growing ecology of Web services.

Tuesday, June 11, 2002

As a general rule functionality is more important than presentation. But for BPM, advanced visualization techniques are intrinsically part of the function, helping users to analyze modeling and communicate process models.

The Web Service Choreography Interface (WSCI) is an XML-based interface description language that describes the flow of messages exchanged by a Web Service participating in choreographed interactions with other services. The WSCI 1.0 specification was codeveloped by BEA Systems, Intalio, SAP AG, and Sun Microsystems to add an additional layer to the Web Service stack to describe the required behavior of a Web Service relative to the message exchange it must support.

WSCI describes the dynamic interface of the Web Service participating in a given message exchange by means of reusing the operations defined for a static interface. WSCI works in conjunction with the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), the basis for the W3C Web Services Description Working Group; it can also work with another service definition language such as BPML.

Think of WSCI as defining the public interface to a process or between processes, in much the same way as the coin slot of a Coke machine is an interface that supports the end to process of obtaining a can of Coke. Whereas the end to end process, specifically the internal processes of the Coke machine and the thirsty human would be defined in BPML, the interface between the two participants would be defined in WSCI.

Wednesday, June 05, 2002

IBM says ... The EAI subdiscipline known as business process management (BPM) or business process integration (BPI) has now evolved to the point where EAI vendors are touting their ability to seamlessly integrate an organization's intra- and interenterprise business processes. Although choosing the correct BPM "engine" to meet the organization's integration requirements is certainly key, maximizing the benefits of integrating business processes requires an organization to first have a commitment to delivering business logic via software components. This article discusses why an IT organization must be committed to a component development strategy before it can realize the full benefits of BPM tools.

One of the supreme ironies of last year's AIIM/Gartner user survey is that while virtually every company polled claimed to be using workflow to automate key business processes, so-called workflow vendors were starving. That's because workflow has become less a tool for interapplication integration than an embedded feature of individual enterprise applications, like Siebel or SAP. The success of these monolithic, packaged applications is itself a direct result of the difficulty of custom application integration using tools like workflow. Many CIOs have judged it easier to change their business processes to fit the CRM and ERP packages than to try to integrate the menagerie of disparate systems spread across their front or back offices.